Climate and nomadic migration in a nonlinear world: evidence of the historical China
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Climate and nomadic migration in a nonlinear world: evidence of the historical China Olivier Damette1
· Stephane Goutte2 · Qing Pei3
Received: 17 June 2020 / Accepted: 15 October 2020 / © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper deals with climate change and nomadic migration relationships at a long-term and wide geographical scale using a statistical approach in the vein of Bai and Kung (Rev Econ Stat 93:970–981 2011). More precisely, it presents a reassessment of these relationships in a nonlinear world using threshold regressions, time varying-copula, and nonlinear causality tests. The large amount of historical records in China enables us to re-interpret the link between climate and historical social dynamics (Hsiang et al., Science 341:1235367 2013) through different regimes of temperature and precipitation. Our nonlinear results have confirmed the role of climatic factors on migration. However, we find that climatic factors have affected the migration flows only during some sub-periods (especially 300–500 AD and 1050–1300 AD). As a consequence, the importance of the precipitation effect on migration has probably been slightly overestimated whereas the role of temperature anomalies has been underestimated. Keywords Climate change · Nomadic migration · Conflicts · Historical China · Threshold regression · Nonlinearity · Copula · Causality
1 Introduction Considerable academic attention has been given to climate change to explain the nomadic migration worldwide, which deeply shaped human history in the past (Di Cosmo 2002; Halsall 2007; Imber 2002). Case-based method (B¨untgen and Di Cosmo 2016) and statistical approach (Bai and Kung 2011) have been extensively chosen by current scholars to empir Olivier Damette
[email protected] Qing Pei
[email protected] 1
BETA, UMR CNRS 7522, Climate Economic Chair Paris Dauphine University of Lorraine, Nancy, France
2
CEMOTEV, UVSQ, Paris-Saclay and Paris School Business, Paris, France
3
Department of Social Sciences, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Climatic Change
ically examine the historical association between climate change and nomadic migration. In particular, China has accumulated ample ancient archives on nomadic migration because the nomads’ movement frequently threatened territorial security and farming livelihoods (Ge et al. 1997). The large amount of historical records enables the statistical analysis on nomadic migration under climate change at a long-term and wide geographical scale to share the implications to the globe. This kind of quantitative practice is emerging as a recent trend to re-interpret historical social dynamics (Hsiang et al. 2013). Existing macroscale studies, such as by Fang and Liu (1992) and Pei and Zhang (2014), have contributed to the empirical understanding on the nomadic migration under the effects of climate change. The specific roles of temperature and precipitation have been examined using different statistical tools, including correlation, multiple regression, and Grange
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